Stories of Land and Place: An Urban Perspective
Lost and Found: Reclaiming "Community" in Memphis through Revitalization of the Neighborhood
by Stan Hyland
When reflecting on land and place in cities, first thoughts are often of downtown skyscrapers, bridges, or parks. For urban dwellers, however, the significance of land and place is often contained within neighborhoods, the specific buildings, spaces, and people among which they go about their daily lives. As, or more, important than the physical buildings and places, is the history, identity, the very personality of a neighborhood that connects urban people with their space. An essential component of this relationship with space are neighbors — those people with whom they regularly interrelate as they work, shop, learn, play, and pray. Urban neighborhoods, with their blend of residential and commercial areas, and the consequent physical interaction of people on a regular basis, are ripe for community to exist and function in ways that suburban neighborhoods never can. Unfortunately, many urban neighborhoods, and the communities within, have suffered at the hands of public policy under the guise of "urban renewal," and with the internal and external socio-economic conditions of an ever-changing world. The decline of these neighborhoods and communities has resulted in urban blight all, begging the question of how important are neighborhoods to the people who live in them to the cities at large. Can cities survive without healthy urban neighborhoods? And if not, can we envision a future for Memphis built around healthy neighborhoods?
Urban neighborhoods … are ripe for community to exist and function in ways that suburban neighborhoods never can.
When I first came to Memphis in 1976, I was surprised to learn from my colleagues and other professionals that neighborhoods didn't really exist in Memphis. As they put it, there was simply white Memphis and Black Memphis, which were further categorized geographically — midtown, south Memphis, east Memphis, and north Memphis. For them, their residential location did not provide any meaningful connections and relationships, or any sense of identity within their broader social sphere. Not only was I informed that there were no neighborhoods per se, but through public academic and civic forums, I also learned that they were not even desired. Neighborhoods were seen as closed and non-progressive, relics of a passé social and civic infrastructure. Through my students, however, who predominantly came from urban communities, I became educated about Memphis neighborhoods. Not only did neighborhoods exist, but community activists were engaged in struggles across every part of Memphis to prevent intrusions from local government, businesses, and real estate agencies to transform their neighborhoods into investment commodities. The local authorities perceived these neighborhood activists as frustrated, angry and disruptive citizens because they failed to recognize that personal relationships are deeply embedded in place, giving urban neighborhoods an innate value to those who lived in them. To prove this point, in 1976, my students invited me to a "River Rat Reunion" on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, which was the historic site of Fort Pickering as well as a former Native American settlement. Families from throughout the country reassembled on the last Sunday of July each year to grieve their neighborhood lost to urban renewal in the late 1950s. These families carried with them a valued sense of place intimately linked to personal relationships. This reunion put into perspective all the neighborhood activism that I would observe over the next three decades. Throughout this time, my old friend and mentor Stoy Bailey (from the Rozelle Annesdale neighborhood) familiarized me with this Memphis paradox: Memphis is indeed a city of neighborhoods, yet it does not want to embrace them as part of its present, let alone its future.
- Clean up day in the neighborhood
For Memphis to thrive, indeed survive, I believe we need to reclaim community through our urban neighborhoods. To be successful, however, we need to challenge our fundamental philosophical and economic beliefs about the worth and the role of the collective. In her last book, Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs purposefully explains this point. In illustrating our declining culture, rooted in the loss of family and community, she demonstrates how our obsession with consumerism, individualism, and personal mobility contribute to the failure of households to function. She explains that it is incumbent on communities to help fill the gaps. Community, with its varied perspectives and assets has long served individual/family development, and it is best positioned today to see current households through quickly changing conditions. Neighborhood is a natural platform for community to function. For community to exist in our neighborhoods, however, we have to make some essential changes. We need to stop working so hard to increase our individual wealth that we forget about collective wealth. We need to cease commodifying our neighborhoods solely to enhance image and increase property values for market resale and cultural tourism. Finally, we need to recognize the value of public space and evaluate the impact of privatization on our neighborhoods and the relationships within. Some thirty years after the River Rat Reunion experience, our work at the University of Memphis still focuses on strengthening community within urban neighborhoods. Presently, we are collaborating with middle school students in an inner-city neighborhood, undergoing gentrification, about what constitutes a healthy neighborhood. Through interviews with the students, and by the students with fellow residents, four themes developed: clean and safe; heritage; assets; and most importantly, identity and pride. Their neighborhood, like their families, is being ravaged by poverty, crime, drug abuse, and violence. Their neighbors are medical statistics for high infant mortality, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and other health afflictions: and gentrification is closing in on them, bringing "diversity" into the area with its new middle class homes, businesses, and educated residents, skewing the economic and medical statistics.
- Greenlaw Manassas neighbors share stories
The students recognize that gentrification will not save their neighborhood, their community. Gentrification will not protect and nurture their neighborhood's history, culture, relationships, memories, and their sense of space. If not challenged, gentrification will swallow up their neighborhood and their identity. These students have come to recognize that they are responsible for, and have the power to preserve the identity and heritage that grounds their community in its space, to preserve the physical structures and places that connect them with the space as well as each other. They wrote a song entitled "The Power of One." To quote from verse three:
Together we live side by side
In this one community
Old and new must realize
The possibilities
When we look inside our hearts, we'll see
The power of one is all we ever need.
Why is it so difficult for our institutions — our schools, government, churches, and businesses — to change their siloed ways of thinking and shift focus to the intangibles? If our sense of place informs who we are and what our role is in the larger society, what message are we sending these kids about their value and the value of their place, especially if our only solution is gentrification? Why cannot we focus on the potential contributions these kids can make to their neighborhoods, to the city? Do we not owe it to them to equip them with the attitude, knowledge, and resources necessary to develop neighborhoods that support community, their community? Do we not owe it to our city? Community and a sense of place is not an amenity for our neighborhoods or our city, it is an intrinsic value and the essence of our future.
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